Rachel McAdams Is All Wrong (and So Right) for Send Help

Rachel McAdams is so much fun in Send Help that she almost makes you forget her character would make a lot more sense played by, say, an Office-era Phyllis Smith. Linda Liddle is an office workhorse who has spent her career trying to get ahead by working late and grinding out quarterly reports through lunch at her desk, only to see the credit stolen by whatever smirking golf buddy has leapfrogged her up the corporate ladder. On top of her lingering conviction in the powers of meritocracy, she’s socially awkward, unable to read the writing on the wall, whether the message is that her co-workers don’t want her at karaoke or that incoming CEO Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) has no intention of honoring his father’s promise to make her a vice-president. Between C-suite sexism and her own lack of soft skills, Linda has gotten as far as she’s going to go at the company, and everyone around her seems exasperated that she hasn’t accepted the de facto invisibility that society has already begun to assign her in middle age. When Linda intercepts Bradley on his first day in the office in an attempt to get on his radar, he fixates on the flake of tuna fish at the corner of her mouth instead of anything she’s saying. It’s not just the food fragment that irks him, but the very act of having to focus on a woman he’s not attracted to.

Except, well, that woman is Rachel McAdams, whose dimpled beauty doesn’t actually go away just because she starts off the movie in baggy knitwear, orthopedic shoes, and unwashed hair. The premise of Send Help — which was written by Baywatch’s Mark Swift and Damian Shannon and, more interestingly, directed by Sam Raimi in his first non-franchise gig since Drag Me to Hell — relies on how the imbalances between its main characters are reversed when the pair end up stranded on a deserted island while on their way to Bangkok on a business trip. But while McAdams has 13 years on O’Brien, the idea that there’s a yawning attractiveness gap between their two characters is something the movie itself feels a little abashed to be insisting on, especially after Linda, a Survivor fan who’s done a lot of wilderness research, blossoms out of the confines of the cubicle farm. Linda — hair loosened into a riot of curls, sensible flesh-color undergarments repurposed as a bikini — takes to life on the beach like the Swiss Family Robinson by way of a beachwear catalogue, at one point weaving herself a hilariously chic sun hat out of palm fronds like it was nothing. It works because McAdams is unerringly funny, happy to hurl herself into a scene in which she gets drenched in blood and mucus while hunting a boar, or to convince you that her character is absolutely capable of crafting a restaurant-worthy sashimi platter out of items she’s foraged along the shore.

It shouldn’t come as any kind of shock that McAdams, whose breakouts came via her roles in the Rob Schneider movie The Hot Chick and the Canadian series Slings & Arrows, is as talented at physical comedy as she is with delivering jokes. But somehow, maybe because she’s moved between genres so readily throughout her career, it still feels like a joyous surprise every time she gets off an all-timer like her blissfully insincere “Oh no, he died!” in Game Night. She gets some great line readings in Send Help, too. When Bradley, whom Linda has been caring for since they washed up as the sole survivors of their plane crash on the beach, tries to seize back control by telling her she’s fired, she barks out, “Oh, am I? Oh no!” Bradley is a villain airlifted out of an ’80s movie, with his frat loyalties and the way he approaches women in the workplace like someone who has never even heard of discrimination lawsuits, and for a long stretch, he resists the reality of how the tables have turned. The most satisfying scenes in Send Help are the ones in which Linda brings this smirky piece of shit to heel, flaunting her survival competence while he flounders around on an injured leg insisting he can make a go of things himself. But there’s also pleasure in the childlike delight Linda takes in getting to use one of the fire-starting techniques she’s practiced and in the waggly-limbed glee with which she carries a conch she found back to camp.

Raimi indulges Send Help’s gore and gross-out moments with the zest of someone returning to his cult-favorite roots. But when it tries to cast Linda as a figure who, in her own way, is just as uneasy as Bradley, the movie loses its nerve. Send Help owes a lot to movies like Triangle of Sadness and Swept Away, both of which found rich veins of material in upending the established hierarchy among characters when they’re removed from society and left to fend for themselves in the wilderness. Early on, we see Linda turn down a chance to flag down a boat that could have brought them back to civilization, because she’s enjoying her shipwrecked sojourn and being in charge so much. But, after taking pains to establish that Linda also harbors a crush on Bradley that he is aware of but doesn’t reciprocate, the movie can’t bring itself to go anywhere genuinely uncomfortable with this dynamic. By nixing any possibility of sexual coercion, explicit or implicit, Send Help wants us to think there’s one way in which Linda is inherently better than the men who have lorded it over her. Instead, it feels like it’s pulling a Bradley and focusing on the bloodstains in order to avoid looking at the character in all her unruly, unshaved, single-lady yearning — even if it has already undermined that tension by casting two people who wouldn’t be looked at askance if paired in a rom-com. The movie is happy to have Linda commit acts of brutality to preserve her place on top, but what is true equality if not allowing your anti-heroine to be in all ways just as monstrously self-interested as the men? Linda from accounting, or as she’d correct, strategy and planning, deserves to be grotesque too.